Amazon, Zappos, Disney…Cadet? On the path to customer service greatness

In any job it takes some time to get your feet under you, and when I arrived at Cadet a year ago to find that I had the best customer service team in the industry, I had a moment of “Well where do we go from here?” I quickly determined that it’s one thing to be the best; it’s another to be the best of the best. So I set us out on a course to prove that at Cadet, Customer Service is alive and well. What does it mean to be the best of the best? Becoming the best of the best is all in the details. Customer service is unselfish. It is born out of a genuine love and passion for helping people. It’s about ensuring that every member of the customer service team is focused on the right activities, or as Jim Collins puts it in “Good to Great”, getting everyone on the right seat on the bus. It’s about choosing the right words with a customer that imparts a sense of comforting expertise. It’s about trusting each other to make sound decisions without having to get hung up in a pile of red tape. Ultimately customer service greatness comes down to doing the right thing for every customer every time. It’s a tough world we live in. People move fast. Information moves even faster. And most customers dread having to contact customer service for help. But there is no better feeling as a customer than to have a satisfying experience with a company, especially if you are having a problem. So as the leader of Customer Service, what better gift can I give my team than affording them every opportunity to give customers that feeling? As I reflect on the past year, we accomplished so much, but truly the journey is just beginning. I have people come into my office all the time and say, “you need a bigger white board,” because it’s filled with ideas about how we can improve the way we serve our customers. The path to our Epic Customer Service commitment is still unfolding, and that path begins and ends with finding ways to say “yes”. And as long as we remove the barriers of "I can’t", "I won’t" and "I don’t" and clear the path for "I can", "I will" and "I do", there is no limit to where we go from here.